Quote

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Bell Hooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bell Hooks
Entity
Fixed
Hope
Idea
Away
Change
Entities
Ideas
People
Static

More quotes by Bell Hooks

Image
My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.
Bell Hooks
Image
One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.
Bell Hooks
Image
Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.
Bell Hooks
Image
Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
Bell Hooks
Image
A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell Hooks
Image
I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.
Bell Hooks
Image
To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
Bell Hooks
Image
... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.
Bell Hooks
Image
All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions-and society-so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.
Bell Hooks
Image
Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe — not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution it requires complex accounting.
Bell Hooks
Image
Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.
Bell Hooks
Image
Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.
Bell Hooks
Image
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
Bell Hooks
Image
Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.
Bell Hooks
Image
My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.
Bell Hooks
Image
We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.
Bell Hooks
Image
Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.
Bell Hooks
Image
The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.
Bell Hooks
Image
If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.
Bell Hooks
Image
I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.
Bell Hooks